“Told ya,” I sneered at him.
“Bitch,” he chuckled, waving the gun erratically back and forth. “You talk like that when I got the gun? You’re whacked.”
I managed a small shrug without dropping the shot, keeping an eye on his loose gun hand. If I could disarm him enough, I figured that I could make a run for it and duck back into the bar before he could get a clean shot off.
“I’m just saying,” I continued, as if I was having a casual conversation instead of a deadly one. Panic was a knife’s point at my throat but I forced myself to take a deep breath and forge on. Zeus had once told me that being high made you feel like a king, invincible in an ironic way because being high made you anything but. “I don’t think you can hit it clean off. Ask your buddies, I bet they agree with me.”
Bringing his friends into it was the right move.
He turned to them with exaggerated horror, flapping the gun around as he demanded that they vouch for him.
It was my moment and I took it without conscious thought.
I pushed off the wall, leapt over the mounds of garbage and sprinted the four steps to the huge metal door, yanking it open just as a shot popped against the brick beside me. I slammed the door shut, my heart thudding in my throat, then bolted it shut with a finality that made me want to cry.
Seconds later, I heard them cursing as they tried to get in.
I didn’t wait around even though I knew the door would hold. We still had a front entrance and I couldn’t afford to be stuck there all night. It was already two in the morning and I had school the next day.
I turned and ran through the darkened halls. They were so familiar that it was easy to grab my rucksack from the back room and dash back into the main bar toward the front.
When two huge hands grabbed at me, I screamed and swung around to thwack my bag against the intruder.
“Stop.” A tall, broad shadow of a man ordered as his strong hands held me still by the shoulders.
“Get off me,” I ordered, struggling under the hold.
He didn’t budge.
“Brother of The Fallen,” he explained in a low voice that seemed rough with disuse.
Immediately, I settled, peering harder through the dark to see the glint of the small white patch on the front of his leather cut that claimed he was a member of the MC.
“Thank God,” I said in bone-deep relief, sagging against him.
He stiffened in intense discomfort, so I sprung away from him instantly. I wasn’t normally an overtly affectionate person, but I’d been weak with relief that I wasn’t alone with a group of four stoned, misogynistic assholes just outside.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “There’s a group of guys outside that literally just tried to shoot a shot glass off my head.”
The Fallen brother blinked huge brown eyes at me then turned away, squatted slightly and jerked his chin at me from over his shoulder. “Up.”
I stared at him a little slack jawed because if I didn’t know better, it seemed like he wanted to give me a piggyback ride.
“Up,” he repeated.
A guy that clearly didn’t like to be touched was going to give me a piggyback ride out of the bar?
“Um, I don’t think that’s necessary,” I tried.
He sighed impatiently then lifted his hands to show me the small black gun in one palm and the glint of a sharp blade in the other. “Up.”
I swallowed my fear and climbed onto his back. He stiffened as soon as I touched him, so deeply not okay with my body against his that I immediately wanted to get off him.
“Hold on,” he ordered.
I barely had time to blink before he was running, running, through the bar as if I was light as a shadow. I could feel the immense power in his body as he thrust us through the front door at an incredible speed and immediately fired off two shots to the left of us where my abusers would be emerging from the side alley if they were indeed following me.
There were shouts and another shot rang out somewhere behind us.
Yep, they were following us.
What the absolute fuck!?
I clung to the stranger beneath me and ducked my head into his neck as he ducked behind a van and halted in front of a motorcycle. Without any degree of gentleness and all haste, he threw me off his back and onto the tiny backseat of the bike before he swung a leg over it and gunned the engine.
“Hold. On,” he gritted between his teeth as he peeled out into the streets, the bike at such a horizontal angle to the pavement that my hair brushed across it before we righted and shot forward into the night.